NOLA Up Slick’s Creek

Some 60 hours after a tanker struck a barge in the Mississippi River near New Orleans, causing the worst oil spill in the area in more than a decade, the French Quarter is abandoned with noxious fumes filling the air. Two New Orleans residents have filed a class action suit.

New York Times

A wildlife refuge downstream—a fall stopover for some 100,000 migrating birds—is bracing for the spill to reach it, but little can be done to trap the oil because of quick river currents.

The lessons of the tragedy are embarrassingly heavy-handed. Environmental injustice is rampant in New Orleans. Fossil fuels are a dirty, dirty business. (Andy Revkin offers the spill as a cautionary tale against drilling in the Arctic.) Corporations are not held accountable for mistakes: The pilot of a tugboat pushing the barge was improperly licensed; legal accountability will be difficult to nail down because shipping companies take shelter in countries with loose regulations.

One less obvious lesson is that industrial accidents are bad for the economy: This one caused nearly 100 miles of the Mississippi to be closed down for two days at a cost of more than $100,000 a day to the local economy. Some 200 vessels have been forced to sit idle—doing further damage to the water and air. As with San Francisco’s own Cosco Busan incident and the notorious Exxon Valdez spill, the taxpayers will end up footing the lion’s share of the bill.

[Update: A reader in New Orleans writes that the French Quarter is not abandoned, as the New York Timesreported.]